Ella deflates. “Well, that’s…yeah.”
The silhouette of Amy through the back window kicks Ella’s seat. “Well, now that our paranoia has been established, can we get on the fucking ball?” She opens her door, unclips her seatbelt, slides out, and points at the empty space between her place and Desmond’s. “Get in, Kinsey.” Without waiting for my response, she marches over to my truck, pops the passenger door, and hauls out the duffel bag full of gifts, carrying it back over to the SUV.
Desmond pats the seat next to him. “Hurry up now, Calvin. Or Ramirez and his team won’t have any backup.”
I glance to Ella, but her forehead is pressed against the steering wheel, and she’s muttering swears under her breath. Riker peers over the top of her head at me, a heavy, worn look in his hooded eyes. He’s my captain, not Amy or Desmond, and I respect that enough to wait for his final judgment on the issue.
Six seconds tick by, and he delivers it: “Get in, Cal. We’ll take you home. On one condition: You do not, under any circumstances, get out of this vehicle. You stay in the SUV, with your seatbelt on, for the duration of our mission. You will not fight. You will not involve yourself, at all, in this grocery store pissing contest. Clear?”
“As crystal, Captain.” I scamper by Amy, who’s smirking, and scoot up next to Desmond, who’s wearing an eerily similar expression. “Now let’s get going. I look forward to watching you all kick some werewolf and wizard butt. From a safe distance. Behind bulletproof glass and armored doors.”
“That’s the spirit, Kinsey.” Amy tosses the duffel bag in the back of the SUV and slips into the vehicle, slamming the door. She kicks Ella’s seat again. “Hit the gas, sister. Let’s roll.”
Ella sighs deeply and taps the accelerator, as instructed.
Way faster than the speed limit allows, we zip through the icy streets and arrive at Stein’s in what must be a record five minutes and forty-three seconds. Ella skids the SUV to a less-than-graceful stop behind the other three black DSI vehicles parked half a block away from the grocery store under fire. Even from a distance, the signs of a violent disturbance are noticeable: a broken show window, the edges stained red, several overturned carts in front of the main entrance, scared people huddling behind a few civilian cars parked in the street-side spots next to the sidewalk.
The DSI auxiliary teams have a perimeter set, twenty feet or so around the building. One team has taken up a strategic battle formation near the front doors, guns drawn. The other team I don’t see, which means they must have headed around back to guard the loading bay doors, in case one of the fighters decides to flee that direction.
Without stopping to concoct a specific battle plan, my team empties out of the SUV and rushes toward the store, leaving me behind, doors locked. Through the tinted windows, I watch as the auxiliary agents allow Riker’s elites through the perimeter. The captain himself stops just inside the doorway, cane planted firmly on the worn tiles. Like a sentry intending to block anyone who dares to try and pass him. (He’s not fast enough to lead a charge with his injured leg—and he knows it.) He nods for Ella to continue onward, and she guides Desmond and Amy beyond the cash registers, back toward Stein’s locally famous bakery. They turn down the cereal aisle, and I lose sight of them.
For two or three minutes, nothing happens. The night is still.
Then—a gunshot.
Riker jerks, whips his head around, and calls for two of the auxiliary agents to head inside. The instant the agents move toward the door, three entire aisles of groceries come crashing down. Cereal boxes explode, throwing Wheaties and Cheerios into the air like confetti. The entire selection of Campbell’s soup blasts off its racks, each can bursting like a live grenade, painting the floor tomato red and the concentrated yellow of chicken noodle. Flimsy plastic bags tear wide open, slinging dry beans and rice thirty feet across the store. And finally, in the middle of all the carnage, half-buried beneath a mountain of ruined food—a werewolf lies panting.
The wizard who decked him with a spell, some older Latino man I’ve never seen, darts over the toppled metal shelving with an actual wand clutched in his hand. His light brown face is streaked with crimson red where the Wolf’s claws raked across his head and cheek, deep, a wound that would scar him for life without magical healing. Fury steaming out of his every breath, he points his wand at the downed Wolf and opens his mouth to shout what must be a deadly spell.
Only for Ella Dean to charge up behind him and tackle him to the floor.
That poor bastard doesn’t know what hit him.
Ella snaps his wrist mid-fall, the wand spiraling away, and then bashes his face right into an overturned crate of sardine tins. The wizard’s nose explodes on impact. Blood spurts out and rains across his wrinkled white button-up. He crumples to the floor and tries to curl up in the fetal position, but Ella’s not having that. She flips him over onto his stomach, pins his hands, and cuffs him in one swift move I definitely need her to teach me.
The wizard could probably get out of the cuffs with a well-placed spell, but Desmond and Amy are now loitering behind Ella, guns and beggar rings at the ready. The man would be a fool to try anything, lest he earn himself a bullet to the ass, courtesy of Major Sugawara. And even though most ICM practitioners loathe DSI, they know better than to test the battle-worn elite detectives in the middle of a combat situation. The wizard shakes his head and spits out some words I can’t hear but imagine as a string of nasty swears.
Ella tips her head back, unamused, and drags the guy to his feet, before passing him off to one of the auxiliary agents lying in wait near the registers. The man reluctantly allows the agents to lead him to the exit, where Riker looms with a venomous glare that promises a verbal beat-down of epic proportions. A wizard the Latino man might be, but even he cowers in the presence of a genuinely pissed-off Nicholas Riker.
Meanwhile, at the overturned shelving, Ella, Desmond, and Amy are approaching the injured Wolf. He’s not unconscious—else he’d revert back to human form—but he clearly took a beating from the wizard. Both his hind legs are bent in awkward directions, and his breathing is erratic. There are several patches of charred fur, burnt flesh beneath, mostly along the left side of his belly and chest, where he must have taken the brunt of a fire spell of some kind.
His injuries are nothing a Wolf can’t shrug off with accelerated healing. But he doesn’t have quite enough time to heal fully before Riker’s elites surround him. Ella gestures to him and says something, to which the Wolf doesn’t immediately respond. Then Amy steps past Ella, bends close to the Wolf, and obviously threatens him with much worse injuries than he already has. Because the Wolf tenses in terror, and a few seconds later, there is no Wolf. Just a pale, naked man, lying on the dirty tiles, covered in spilled cereal and soup.
Amy makes quick work of him with her cuffs. Ella peers over her shoulder at Desmond and points to the Wolf man. Desmond nods, maneuvers around her, and takes up a guard position next to the Wolf, intending to keep him in one place until, presumably, the rest of the fighting in the store, hidden from view, has been dealt with. Ella and Amy then retreat back toward the bakery area, out of sight. Ramirez’s team must be there somewhere, dealing with the other two Wolves and the remaining wizard.
Now, see, this is the kind of mission I—
Déjà vu.
I go rigid in my seat, instinctively pulling away from the sensation, only for my old friend nausea to greet me again. Gagging, I force myself to relax, muscles slack, back and head resting against the leathery seat.
I seek out Navarro’s touted balance point. No rejection. No acceptance. No response at all, except to let the déjà vu happen as it will.
If I found the balance point at Slate’s house, I can find it a second time.
I calm my breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
The feeling of déjà vu sharpens, and for a brief flicker of time, it’s all encompassing, pumping through my every vein, infecting every cell. And then, like I walk through a wall of slow-moving air,
a sense of relief passes over me, followed by the same phantom tug in my brain that led me to Slate’s secret basement room. I open eyes I didn’t realize I’d closed, guided by that tug, and turn my head to the right.
At the end of a dark alley between a Hallmark store and a nail salon—is a Wolf.
Donahue.
My déjà vu dissolves into the ether, and reality crashes down around me in a flurry of sight and sound, like my senses were muted during the episode. My brain suddenly kicks into high gear. Thoughts rush by:
I’m in the SUV all by myself, with no weapons on my person. Every other DSI agent in the vicinity is half a block away. Wolves can move faster than people. So if I roll down the window and call out for help, Donahue will get to the SUV and dismember me before anyone can come to my rescue. If I say nothing at all, Donahue might not notice I’m still in the SUV, given the tinted windows. But then, he could already know I’m here, and defenseless, if he’s been trailing the SUV for some time. And…
Wait.
That doesn’t make any sense. Donahue couldn’t be after me. He had no way of knowing I’d be released from the DSI infirmary today. Or that I’d be at the task meeting this afternoon. Or that I’d tag along with my team when they came to stop the fight at Stein’s. And, beyond those points, if Donahue wanted to hunt me down and rip me limb from limb, he simply could have followed me home, waited until I was alone, walked right up to the front door, knocked politely, and attacked when I came to greet my visitor.
So, no. I’m not his target.
But he must have a target. Or else he wouldn’t have shown up here.
Who…?
I tear my eyes from the werewolf in the alley, who’s prowling ever closer to the sidewalk, and scan the crowd of bystanders again. None of the people cowering behind the vehicles outside the grocery store look familiar, and besides a small group of people loitering around the entrance to a bar a block away, peering curiously at the ruckus in and around Stein’s, there’s no one else nearby.
So unless Donahue is going after one of the DSI agents at Stein’s…but no, that doesn’t work either. He couldn’t have predicted exactly who’d arrive on scene; Riker could have sent another team in our stead. And Donahue wouldn’t have pulled this stunt on a whim because it’ll inevitably paint a very large, very red target on his back until the day he dies.
No member of the supernatural super-community risks public exposure without drawing the wrath of every violent creature in the world. As soon as word gets around that he did this—well, the last fool who tried to expose the supernatural world, a vampire, I believe, ended up nailed to a cross in a children’s play park with his entrails spilled out on the ground around him.
(Yeah, certain members of the supernatural world are indeed that vindictive. Ugh.)
Anyway, my point is:
Donahue would only have decided on this stunt at Stein’s if his plan involves going out in a blaze of glory.
Which means there must be someone here worth dying to attack. (And it’s not a DSI agent.)
A wriggling maggot of a thought worms its way into my head.
Could it be?
I check Donahue’s approach—he’s a few steps from the lip of the alley now—and try my hardest to follow his line of sight. Those dark Wolf eyes are staring at something (that is, someone) in particular. My gaze, however, finds only a light pole at the end of Donahue’s glare, its soft yellow bulb flickering on and off, unable to decide whether the overcast day qualifies as dark or light. There’s no one in the vicinity of this light pole, the nearest bystander a good twenty feet off.
But as I peel my eyes and survey the square of sidewalk beneath the light, I find something out of the ordinary. A person-shaped shadow, waffling in and out of existence in time with the light pole’s cycling.
There’s a magic practitioner leaning against the pole. Underneath a veil.
And I know who it is.
Allen Marcus.
Of course. He was the one who called in this incident in the first place, and, as the local ICM leader, it’s his responsibility to deal with any potential leaks of practitioner secrets to the general public. With the unenthusiastic permission of the mayor’s office, Marcus has the right to strip civilians of their recent memories, in the case of undeniable exposure. The people lurking outside the grocery store qualify in spades, having witnessed naked people turn into giant wolves, followed by seemingly ordinary people performing legitimate magic.
Marcus is waiting by the light pole for DSI to finish up inside and deliver the two wizards back to ICM custody for discipline. And then he’ll check the final box off on his to-do list: clear out any untoward memories the bystanders might have.
Out of curiosity, I pluck my cell phone from my pocket. No signal. Marcus is using some kind of ward to block cell traffic around the grocery store so that no one has a chance to live stream or upload any video of the supernatural fight.
He’s sneaky. I’ll give him that.
He’s also in danger.
McKinney was convinced someone else in the ICM was in cahoots with Halliburton. He never found out who, or if that was even true—because fuck if I know—so Donahue is just going for the most prominent target he can get his hands on in Aurora. He’s got nothing better to do with the time he has left, which isn’t much, seeing as his ugly mug will be on wanted posters all over the country by the end of the week.
One last hurrah, he must be thinking, sneaking closer to Marcus. One last attack on the dreaded ICM menace.
I can’t see Marcus underneath his veil, but he should be able to hear me if I give him some kind of warning that a Wolf is about to pounce on top of him. The question is what signal I should use that won’t turn Donahue on me—because I imagine if he spots the guy who killed his boss, he might have a change of heart about his intended target. And then, of course, there are the bystanders to worry about, none the wiser that another monstrous Wolf is creeping up on them from behind. If they get embroiled in this fight, they could end up dead. Or turned.
Donahue pauses at the very edge of the alley, which is roughly ten feet from the SUV I’m sitting in. In order to sneak up on Marcus, who’s probably looking in the direction of the grocery store, the Wolf will have to pass behind the four DSI vehicles to get into a position for an ambush in the wizard’s blind spot. Which means he’ll pass by me. Which means I have the chance to deter his attack before it starts. Make some commotion. Which Marcus will notice. And then the wizard can take down the Wolf while he’s far enough away from the bystanders to minimize their risk of injury.
Perfect.
Except for the fact I’m not supposed to get out of the SUV.
I promised I’d stay put.
My eyes drift from my boss, visible in the store’s entryway, still railing on the wizard who knocked over all the shelving, to the innocent bystanders with no clue what powers surround them, to Marcus’ flickering shadow underneath the pole.
The Wolf in my periphery slips out of the alley and slinks alongside the SUVs, padding softly across the packed snow. He peeks through the gap between the second and third vehicles to make sure his prey is in the same spot. Confirming the wizard hasn’t moved, he skulks onward. Closer to my SUV. And closer. And closer. And…
You know what?
Fuck it.
I’ll take the verbal flogging from Riker.
Unclipping my seatbelt, I spin around, reach into the back of the SUV, and heave up my duffle bag full of gifts. There are probably specialized weapons stashed in the equipment boxes bolted on the walls, but I don’t have time to get fancy with rifles like Harmony Burgess. Plus, I only need to distract Donahue for a few seconds. Long enough for Marcus to catch wind of the danger and intervene.
I wrap the straps of the bag tightly around my bandaged hands and reach for the switch on the door that’ll blow the window. Kneeling low on the floor so Donahue won’t spot me early, I peek an inch above the doorframe. The Wolf is three feet from my window an
d closing in. Come on, I mouth, just a bit closer.
Donahue stalks up near the window, my finger inches toward the switch—
—and he stops.
His Wolf ears twitch from side to side, like he’s caught some new sound he didn’t expect to hear between the murmurs of the bystanders and the raucous brawl inside the store.
My finger trembles against the switch, sweat gathering on the back of my neck, as I wait for Donahue to parse the new sound—a plane, maybe, or a snow plow rumbling by on an adjacent street—and resume moving.
The thing is, he doesn’t.
Instead of shaking the new noise out of his mind and continuing forward, his Wolf ears flatten against his head, his muscles tense up like he’s ready to leap thirty feet, and his eyes, those dark, bitter, reflective werewolf eyes…roll directly toward where I’m squatting in the SUV.
It’s about when Donahue charges at the window that I finally realize what he heard.
My heartbeat.
(Boy, I miscalculated this time, didn’t I?)
A giant Wolf head fills my view through the window as Donahue slams into the side of the SUV. The vehicle rocks to the left, and I lose my footing and land flat on my aching ass. I fumble the duffle bag, and it comes crashing down on top of me, thirty pounds of gifts battering my body even blacker and bluer than it already was. Flailing, I toss the bag into the seat and scramble up, only to find Donahue has backed up to ram the SUV again.
He rushes forward and drives his head into the window. Furry skin peels back to reveal the white, bloody skull beneath, cracked from the impact. But the bulletproof window cracks too. And unlike the Wolf, the window can’t repair itself.
As the Wolf retreats a second time to align himself for another run at the SUV, I get the pleasure of watching torn, dangling werewolf flesh begin to rapidly knit itself back together.
Rapid healing is not as pleasant-looking as you might imagine.
My right hand clutches the duffle bag strap, a dozen half-baked plans forming in my muddled mind at once. I chance a glance over my shoulder, but Marcus’ shadow is still standing under the faulty light pole. Either he hasn’t heard the commotion over here, the sound lost in the windy day, or the noise from the grocery store battle is masking it. (Or, I think grimly, maybe he knows exactly what’s happening to me but doesn’t care to intervene because it’s not ICM business. Erica mentioned to me once that the ICM doesn’t really give a shit about what happens to Crows.)
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 43